The commoner king

Livestock

Elera p.o.v

The ceremonial screen was made of lacquered wood and rice paper and approximately four hundred years of tradition, and it stood between me and the foreign king like a polite agreement that we were both pretending this wasn't humiliating.

I had been briefed on the protocol by a palace attendant who delivered the information with the enthusiasm of someone reading funeral rites. The screen preserved the dignity of both parties during the initial assessment. The bride candidate would be observed walking, standing, and responding to questions. The groom's representatives would evaluate. The groom himself, if present, which was unusual, which meant something I hadn't figured out yet, would remain behind the screen until the formal agreement was reached.

Observed. Evaluated.

I was a horse at market and we were all pretending otherwise.

The receiving hall was full. Not court-full, not the sprawling chaos of a feast, but the specific fullness of a room where everyone present had been chosen to be there and knew it. My father sat to the left of the screen, composed and unreadable in the way he got when something was going well for him. Aldric stood at his shoulder. Calla was absent, which meant she had either been excluded or had successfully avoided this, and I noted that absence and filed it.

I walked in the way I had been taught to walk for occasions like this, shoulders back, pace measured, eyes forward. Not too fast, which read as nervous. Not too slow, which read as difficult. The precise middle speed of a woman who had been told her whole life to take up exactly the right amount of space and had become very good at calibrating it.

Behind the screen: stillness. Two shapes that I could make out through the paper, one that moved, which would be an advisor, and one that didn't, which wouldn't.

I stopped at the marked position on the floor and waited.

"Turn, please." The voice came from the left of the screen. An advisor. Middle-aged, clipped accent, the particular tone of someone doing a job they consider beneath their actual capabilities. I turned. "Again." I turned again. "Thank you. You may face forward."

I faced forward. I looked at the screen and thought about nothing, which is a skill and not a natural state and I had worked very hard at it.

"Can you manage a household?"

"Yes."

"Have you received education in governance and diplomacy?"

"Yes."

"Are you in good health?" A pause, calibrated. "To your knowledge."

There it was. I had expected something like it and it still landed like a thumb pressed into a bruise.

"Yes," I said. My voice did not change. I was proud of my voice.

The advisor consulted something, papers, from the sound of it. I watched my father from the corner of my eye. He was doing the thing where he looked at me without looking at me, the trick he had perfected over twenty-three years of not wanting to acknowledge my existence while also needing to monitor it. He looked satisfied. Not proud, my father's satisfaction and his pride were different and I had learned not to confuse them.

Satisfied meant this was going the way he needed it to go.

"One final question." The advisor's voice shifted slightly. Testing now, not just cataloguing. "You are aware that this union, if agreed, would place you in a kingdom several weeks' travel from your own. You would have limited contact with your family and your court. Does this present any difficulty for you?"

The room waited.

I understood the question under the question: are you going to be a problem about this? I understood what they needed me to say. I understood that the correct answer was no, no difficulty, happy to go, grateful for the opportunity, and that giving that answer was the only move available to me in this particular room at this particular moment.

"None," I said.

My father exhaled. Small. Controlled. But I heard it.

The advisor said something low and in another language to the shape behind the screen. The shape, the still one, the one that hadn't moved in the entire proceeding shifted. Not much. Just a turn of the head.

Like a question being considered.

Then, a single word. Agreement. Acceptance.

And the screen began to move.

A servant's hands drew it back from the left side in the smooth practiced motion of someone who had done this many times, slow enough to be ceremonial, not slow enough to be theatrical. The lacquered panels folded back one by one and the shape behind them became a man and I was already composing my face into the correct expression of appropriate gratitude when he spoke.

Two words. My name, in the formal address. Said to the room, not to me.

Accepted.

The sound hit the back of my skull and traveled down through my jaw and into my chest and stopped my lungs completely for three full seconds.

I knew that voice.

I knew it the way you know something that lives in the part of your memory that doesn't file things neatly, the part that stores sounds and smells and the specific weight of a hand, the part that bypasses every rational system you have and goes straight to the place that was there before you learned to be careful.

I had last heard that voice say my name in the dark, six months ago, in a garden that wasn't mine, with his forehead against mine and both of us pretending the morning wasn't coming.

My face did not change. My hands did not move. My breathing, by some extraordinary act of will that I intended to think about later with genuine respect for myself, stayed even.

I looked at the man behind the screen as it finished opening.

He was already looking at me.

His eyes, those eyes that I had thought about in the way you think about something you are trying to stop thinking about, which is constan,

were calm. Professional. Moving across my face the way a man looks at a stranger he is meeting for the first time.

Not a flicker. Not a c***k. Nothing.

He looked at me like I was someone he had never seen before in his life.

And then, deliberately, with the precision of a door being shut from the inside, he looked away.